Thanks.
I didn't mean to imply he wasn't a Shinto. Some of the formative Japanese nationalist thinkers of that era had origins in Confucianism alongside Shinto (and often Taoism), and some of these eventually turned their back on Confucianism. (I had familiarised myself with that much.) I think the kokugakuin site tends to mention the influences - other than Shinto - in the famous persons it covers, since their Shinto leanings tend to be implicit already.
My reason for bringing up the fact of Aizawa's Confucian background is because, in my experience of Chinese cases of nationalist people with Confucian backgrounds in earlier centuries, they were not as pedantic - as full-fledged heathens are - about the native religion/Gods. Rather, they saw the Gods and adherence to worship/tradition as a practicality. In Korea and Japan too, it seems to be the case that the more Confucian they were in their thinking, the looser their pedantry as regards their ancetral pantheons. (Sort of like the difference between Hindoos and modern Hindu nationalists in India - the former is very pedantic, the latter is the opposite except for practical purposes.)
Of course, it is a mere supposition on my part that his active Confucian background is what could have been behind Aizawa's willingness to entertain Amaterasu as male - supposition originating from contrasting him to many others of his and earlier eras who were more strict than he about her gender being female. Even today, Shinto Shrines tend to consider the deity as a Goddess and not a God. In fact, other Japanese nationalists of Shinto leanings insisted on her gender as female in arguing against her origin narrative bearing meaningful similarities to the Chinese (Taoist) Pangku God narrative, who also produced the Sun from one eye and the Moon from the other, but where the primary Chinese Solar Deity is male.
Here, found a relevant discussion on this very topic. The book is labelled "Shinto, Way of the Gods" by one Aston:
Note that I don't actually disagree with the Japanese complaint raised: the Sun from the left eye and the Moon from another - in that order - is indeed seen in China, but whether or not this is especially significant depends on whether the Sun's origin or even presence in one eye, and the Moon's origin/presence in another, is at all significant too. Because at least the more general case of the Sun and Moon Gods being eyes of another God is also seen in, say, India - and also occurs in many other heathen instances besides (IIRC African examples too). And for *that* more general commonality, there is surely no need to draw a directional arrow between any of the nations involved either (though, admittedly, ancient Chinese connections with Japan have more likelihood, since there are cases of Chinese and Japanese similarities that *do* contain more obvious, direct and full parallels, such as the Chinese narrative of the Divine Archer sent to remove the extra Suns from the heavens. A very similar solar narrative exists in Japan. And there apparently exist direct parallels between the Izanagi & Izanami's narrative and several other Asian nations.) But whether Pangku's particular narrative exerted any influence over that of Izanagi can remain somewhat open-ended, IMO, since the alleged similarity is not all that striking in the comparison. In any case, it is not necessary to take any relationship between them for granted.*
Hirata's insistence that the distinctness of the Gods in question is relevant *because* the genders of the Sun deities produced don't align (Amaterasu being female and the Chinese Sun God being male) - is a very heathen objection: whether or not he submitted it in order to keep Shinto distinct (and Japan independent) from a historical Chinese influence, becomes secondary to the fact that heathens tend to insist on the reality of the identity of their Gods as revealed to them and by native tradition. So the "but, but, but Amaterasu is female" objection sounds to a heathen like "but Amaterasu is a female hence *obviously* a different God", which is a very valid argument: arguments for distinct identities to avoid conflation where it is not warranted or supported by tradition are valid. Heathens are not "world mythologists", but adherents of their Gods, after all.
* As for Gods generating the heavens or even the All from their bodies, this is a theme seen throughout heathenism. Even the puruSha sooktam has a Hindu God producing realities from every part of his body. The Gods are by nature deemed to be generative, so this tends to be a natural insight and understanding that heathens have of their Gods in various parts of their world.
IIRC, in the American movie of The Last of the Mohicans (epic!), you have the male protagonist tell the female one about his native American (Mohican) adoptive community's narrative concerning the creation of the stars: their God also mourned the loss of his Goddess wife (like the Shinto Izanagi mourning - and afterward coming to terms with - the loss of Izanami, and thereafter producing his 3 divine children). In the Mohican case, their God "drew the stars" in the night sky from the deceased yet obviously still-divine body of his wife, which stars he then strewed across said night sky as a monument to her memory. <- All the poetic wording is from the movie, only lightly paraphrased. This seems to legitimately follow a Mohican sacred narrative and is unlikely to have been invented for the movie, despite the magnificent swelling score playing in the background and playing on the viewer's feelings.
[Interesting general, top-level feature seen in the Mohican, Shinto and Taoist Panku cases: one God "dies" and this directly or indirectly results in a divine body producing several heavenly bodies. I'm not otherwise implying they're the same.]
And - repeating - there is a Norse/Germanic narrative about Gods that is also not dissimilar from the Chinese P'anku one, though the similarity is again only in general lines. (Inserting my now-usual pre-emptive statement: This too is not a PIE "trope". No more than the serpent/dragon that swallows its own tail, etc.)
On this:
[quote name='Bharatvarsh2' date='27 October 2014 - 07:47 PM' timestamp='1414418961' post='117418']
Yes a Bauddha appropriation of Ushas. I don't know if Ushas was known in Japan before Buddhism, there is a book by David Hall on the significance of Marishiten and her rituals to the Samurai but I haven't yet had time to read it.[/quote]
Yes, well, Buddhism always first insinuates their Bauddhified entity as an identity-equivalent of a native God, and then introduces the Bauddising rituals, and then does their replacement routine: replacing the native perceptions of the native heathen Gods with the novel Buddhist perception of clones=fictions.
[It is not only christianism that believes in the Jesuit adage that the Ends Justify the Means. For Buddhism, the Taoist Big Dipper and the Shinto Amaterasu - for example - were merely the means to get at the heathens attached to these Gods, and thereby Bauddhify these heathens' views of their own native Gods all down to their ritual worship, as a stepping stone to properly Bauddhifying the entire person.]
And oh yes: when some heathens didn't comply (like some martial Shinto communities, who held out too long for Buddhism's liking), Buddhism got angry and would try yet other means... Oh well, it's sink or swim: what doesn't kill you, makes you immune. And allergic. And react to expel - in several Asian cases.
Quote:Aizawa was a Confucian & follower of Shinto also, he had a very a big influence on Shinto in the modern period because his Shinron was the single most influential text in the Bakumatsu period among those who contributed to the Meiji restoration & many of his ideas were adopted by the new Meiji gov't.
I didn't mean to imply he wasn't a Shinto. Some of the formative Japanese nationalist thinkers of that era had origins in Confucianism alongside Shinto (and often Taoism), and some of these eventually turned their back on Confucianism. (I had familiarised myself with that much.) I think the kokugakuin site tends to mention the influences - other than Shinto - in the famous persons it covers, since their Shinto leanings tend to be implicit already.
My reason for bringing up the fact of Aizawa's Confucian background is because, in my experience of Chinese cases of nationalist people with Confucian backgrounds in earlier centuries, they were not as pedantic - as full-fledged heathens are - about the native religion/Gods. Rather, they saw the Gods and adherence to worship/tradition as a practicality. In Korea and Japan too, it seems to be the case that the more Confucian they were in their thinking, the looser their pedantry as regards their ancetral pantheons. (Sort of like the difference between Hindoos and modern Hindu nationalists in India - the former is very pedantic, the latter is the opposite except for practical purposes.)
Of course, it is a mere supposition on my part that his active Confucian background is what could have been behind Aizawa's willingness to entertain Amaterasu as male - supposition originating from contrasting him to many others of his and earlier eras who were more strict than he about her gender being female. Even today, Shinto Shrines tend to consider the deity as a Goddess and not a God. In fact, other Japanese nationalists of Shinto leanings insisted on her gender as female in arguing against her origin narrative bearing meaningful similarities to the Chinese (Taoist) Pangku God narrative, who also produced the Sun from one eye and the Moon from the other, but where the primary Chinese Solar Deity is male.
Here, found a relevant discussion on this very topic. The book is labelled "Shinto, Way of the Gods" by one Aston:
Quote:The circumstance that, according to one story, the Sun-Goddesss was produced from the left and the Moon-God from the right eye of Izanagi is suggestive of the influence of China, where the left takes precedence of the right. Compare the Chinese myth of P'anku: "P'anku came into being in the great waste; his beginning is unknown. In dying he gave birth to the material universe. His breath was transmuted into the wind and clouds, his voice into thunder, his left eye into the sun, and his right eye into the moon." Hirata endeavours to combat the obvious inference from this comparison by pointing out that the sun is masculine in China and feminine in Japan. How little weight is due to this objection appears from the fact that two so nearly allied nations as the English and the Germans differ in the sex which they attribute to the sun, as do also closely related tribes of Australian aborigines and Ainus of Yezo.(Haven't confirmed that it is the same Hirata as the famous one, since the above isn't where I read about it, though I'm assuming it is the same person.)
Note that I don't actually disagree with the Japanese complaint raised: the Sun from the left eye and the Moon from another - in that order - is indeed seen in China, but whether or not this is especially significant depends on whether the Sun's origin or even presence in one eye, and the Moon's origin/presence in another, is at all significant too. Because at least the more general case of the Sun and Moon Gods being eyes of another God is also seen in, say, India - and also occurs in many other heathen instances besides (IIRC African examples too). And for *that* more general commonality, there is surely no need to draw a directional arrow between any of the nations involved either (though, admittedly, ancient Chinese connections with Japan have more likelihood, since there are cases of Chinese and Japanese similarities that *do* contain more obvious, direct and full parallels, such as the Chinese narrative of the Divine Archer sent to remove the extra Suns from the heavens. A very similar solar narrative exists in Japan. And there apparently exist direct parallels between the Izanagi & Izanami's narrative and several other Asian nations.) But whether Pangku's particular narrative exerted any influence over that of Izanagi can remain somewhat open-ended, IMO, since the alleged similarity is not all that striking in the comparison. In any case, it is not necessary to take any relationship between them for granted.*
Hirata's insistence that the distinctness of the Gods in question is relevant *because* the genders of the Sun deities produced don't align (Amaterasu being female and the Chinese Sun God being male) - is a very heathen objection: whether or not he submitted it in order to keep Shinto distinct (and Japan independent) from a historical Chinese influence, becomes secondary to the fact that heathens tend to insist on the reality of the identity of their Gods as revealed to them and by native tradition. So the "but, but, but Amaterasu is female" objection sounds to a heathen like "but Amaterasu is a female hence *obviously* a different God", which is a very valid argument: arguments for distinct identities to avoid conflation where it is not warranted or supported by tradition are valid. Heathens are not "world mythologists", but adherents of their Gods, after all.
* As for Gods generating the heavens or even the All from their bodies, this is a theme seen throughout heathenism. Even the puruSha sooktam has a Hindu God producing realities from every part of his body. The Gods are by nature deemed to be generative, so this tends to be a natural insight and understanding that heathens have of their Gods in various parts of their world.
IIRC, in the American movie of The Last of the Mohicans (epic!), you have the male protagonist tell the female one about his native American (Mohican) adoptive community's narrative concerning the creation of the stars: their God also mourned the loss of his Goddess wife (like the Shinto Izanagi mourning - and afterward coming to terms with - the loss of Izanami, and thereafter producing his 3 divine children). In the Mohican case, their God "drew the stars" in the night sky from the deceased yet obviously still-divine body of his wife, which stars he then strewed across said night sky as a monument to her memory. <- All the poetic wording is from the movie, only lightly paraphrased. This seems to legitimately follow a Mohican sacred narrative and is unlikely to have been invented for the movie, despite the magnificent swelling score playing in the background and playing on the viewer's feelings.
[Interesting general, top-level feature seen in the Mohican, Shinto and Taoist Panku cases: one God "dies" and this directly or indirectly results in a divine body producing several heavenly bodies. I'm not otherwise implying they're the same.]
And - repeating - there is a Norse/Germanic narrative about Gods that is also not dissimilar from the Chinese P'anku one, though the similarity is again only in general lines. (Inserting my now-usual pre-emptive statement: This too is not a PIE "trope". No more than the serpent/dragon that swallows its own tail, etc.)
On this:
[quote name='Bharatvarsh2' date='27 October 2014 - 07:47 PM' timestamp='1414418961' post='117418']
Yes a Bauddha appropriation of Ushas. I don't know if Ushas was known in Japan before Buddhism, there is a book by David Hall on the significance of Marishiten and her rituals to the Samurai but I haven't yet had time to read it.[/quote]
Yes, well, Buddhism always first insinuates their Bauddhified entity as an identity-equivalent of a native God, and then introduces the Bauddising rituals, and then does their replacement routine: replacing the native perceptions of the native heathen Gods with the novel Buddhist perception of clones=fictions.
[It is not only christianism that believes in the Jesuit adage that the Ends Justify the Means. For Buddhism, the Taoist Big Dipper and the Shinto Amaterasu - for example - were merely the means to get at the heathens attached to these Gods, and thereby Bauddhify these heathens' views of their own native Gods all down to their ritual worship, as a stepping stone to properly Bauddhifying the entire person.]
And oh yes: when some heathens didn't comply (like some martial Shinto communities, who held out too long for Buddhism's liking), Buddhism got angry and would try yet other means... Oh well, it's sink or swim: what doesn't kill you, makes you immune. And allergic. And react to expel - in several Asian cases.